Fortress Forever has recently gotten an influx of players who have asked to help translate FF into their respective local languages. Thankfully, the Source engine does in fact support multiple languages and it's a feature that we'd very much like to support.

If you're interested in translating FF for another language, post in this thread. Here's all you really have to do:

Where X is drive where you have Steam installed. This text file (listed at the end of the post) contains all of the stuff that is written on-screen and in menus for Fortress Forever. If you can translate all of these words into your respective language, then it will be very easy for us to support your language in a future patch. For your convenience, the text file is listed at the end of this message in a [ code ] tag.

1) State which language you are translating FF into. If it's a specific dialect, please make sure to say which it is. If you say that you've translated FF into Chinese, that doesn't help us much as there are many dialects of Chinese (the two most popular being Mandarin and Cantonese).

2) Copy/paste the contents of FortressForever_english.txt that you've translated into your post. Make use of the [ code ] tag (no spaces within it, obviously). The code tag looks like this:

Code:

Code tag!

And the code tag definitely supports other characters besides English, as I'll show you now:

Code:

なに です か？

If you see ?? ?? ?? in the above code box, that's because you don't have Asian characters installed and can't see the Japanese that I've written. Trust me, it's there.

3) Fit everything into one post please. The entire text file can indeed fit into one post along with generous room for comments and the like.

4) If you can do multiple languages, please only do one language per post.

1) Just because you've done a translation does not guarantee that we can get it into the next patch. If it's been 3 months since you've done your translation, we've just been really busy.

2) We would really rather not rely on just one person to translate a language. For all we know, you could have renamed the Scout "Horse Fucker" in Korean. Generally we won't approve a translation for use until we've had a few people look it over.

3) If you see a mistake in someone else's translation, post a correction or your own interpretation here. The more details, the better.

4) As always, please follow the forum rules.

5) Keep in mind that some languages (like Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Russian, etc.) have special characters that just flat-out don't exist in the Fortress Forever font. (Yes, we made our own font!) we'd have to figure out how to work around this, so it would be easier for us to get Polish done (since it uses so many English characters) compared to Russian. We're not biased against your particular language, we just have to figure out some font stuff before we can implement it.

6) The stuff in this text file covers the on-screen messages in-game, but it doesn't cover stuff like textures. For instance, you won't see translated signs like FLAG ROOM even if you have another language enabled. This would involve a good bit of coding and we'd have to make new textures for all that stuff. We'll probably get around to that in the future, but it won't be happening anytime soon. Sorry!

7) Translating FortressForever_english.txt is one of many steps involved in supporting additional languages for Fortress Forever. We'd still have some coding work to do to get it to work properly, so please keep that in mind!

Seems like most of the names work out just fine? So I'd say yeah, translate the proper class names.

Escucha means "listen". So I don't know where that came from. For Demo I'd probably go with something like bombardero for bomber. But that's the sort of judgment only a fluent speaker would be able to make.

Literal translations would sound stupid, but like most of those terms have military terms. Scout, Sniper, Soldier... those are easy. Every country has an army. Demoman? Anything from Bomber, Demolitions Expert, etc. Medic is easy too. I think most languages would have a word for Pyromaniac. Spy shouldn't be that hard, nor should Engineer. So really, the hardest one is HW Guy.

Besides, if we didn't, all people are going to be saying is stuff like:

"What does [Demoman] mean?"

And whatever that other person would say, that's what it should be named.

However, I was wondering if it would be better to left the names in English even if you change the language. In TF2, there's no "Explorador", there's a Scout. People in game communicate classes with their english names (i.e, "Hay una Sentry ahí" = "There's a Sentry there"), so it might be wiser to leave the class names untranslated. Also, some names like "Experto en explosivos" won't fit on the class selection screen due to lenght, so we should get it abreviated into something like "Exp.Explosivos", which doesn't look very well to be honest.

Also: the HWGuy Hints still speaks about overheating. Do we translate that too? =D!

I'm willing to have a go at this for Dutch, but personally I HATE using different words then the English standard term for certain things, it's distracting and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this in the Dutch speaking region. I've never heard any real gamer appreciate a translation (I was actually allready pissed off when I noticed that I couldn't select English as installation language for HL2 since normally that's possible unless you buy some EA game.

I have played TF2 and like firefox11 said, the names are in english. Some Spanish names for the classes sound horrible, imo, so i'll stick to the original names

I have a problem with weapons, for example nailgun and super (insert name here) super i'll translate it for improved atm, but nailgun "pistola de clavos" sounds horrible xD anyone has the names of TFC?